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Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) talks to reporters as he backs into his office at the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 21. He like Vice President Mike Pence believed President Donald Trump would sign a bill without money only for the president to reverse his position. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Inside the frantic negotiations that failed to avert a shutdown

Cory Gardner didn’t like what he was hearing as Senate Republicans met on Friday afternoon.

A group of GOP senators that sat with President Donald Trump earlier that day were offering increasingly dour assessments of the odds of avoiding yet another government shutdown this year, this time over Trump’s border wall. But the first-term Colorado senator still thought a deal was possible.

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Then Gardner’s phone rang, and it was Trump on the line.

“What I heard from the president was, ‘We’re going to get this done, we’re going to get this fixed,’” Gardner said. “He’s ready to find a deal. So, we talked about it.”

After both speaking with the president on the telephone, Gardner and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) stepped into the Republican cloakroom off the Senate floor and desperately tried to dial Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and a former congressional colleague. Eventually, Mulvaney answered with Vice President Mike Pence on the line, and the four Republicans talked. At Perdue's request, Mulvaney, Pence and White House adviser Jared Kushnerwere then dispatchedto the Hill to meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in a last-ditch attempt to find a deal.

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Gardner and Perdue’s efforts didn’t head off a shutdown. Yet the episode highlights an essential component of Trump’s style of being president, especially when it comes to dealing with Congress: his use of back-channels and personal relationships — often circumventing party leaders — to try to get deals done. Trump employs the tactic far more than any recent president. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t. And Friday was a case where it didn't work.

It happened, to real success, during the bipartisan negotiations over the criminal justice reform package. It happened again on Thursday, when conservative House GOP hard-liners Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan went around Republican leaders and urged Trump to back a bill providing $5 billion for the border wall, although that led directly to Friday's shutdown.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) had been ready to postpone the border wall fight until early February and avoid a partial government shutdown. Meadows and Jordan urged Trump to pick the fight with Democrats now, and Trump went along with them — ambushing McConnell and Ryan in the process.

Schumer and the trio of Trump administration officials made some progress in a private meeting on a deal to fund the government and modestly boost border security funding. But it came too late. The Senate and House both adjourned relatively early in the evening, and congressional leaders are still hashing things out with the president and his top officials.

Lawmakers and aides in both parties are cautiously optimistic that the shutdown will be short, believing there’s an emerging consensus around a package of seven annual spending bills, including $1.6 billion in money for fencing. Everyone seems to realize that Trump’s dream of $5 billion for concrete wall funding is dead, including Trump himself. But nobody seems quite sure of what, exactly, Trump will sign after this week’s frenzied back and forth.

On Friday morning, Schumer and McConnell were barely talking. After all, they’d already struck a deal to continue government funding until Feb. 8, only to see Trump pull his support for the plan following the revolt by the House Freedom Caucus.

“Mitch is not going to negotiate with Schumer because he doesn’t know if he can depend on what the president’s bottom line will be. So, that’s understandable,” said Perdue, who met with Trump and other senators on Friday morning. “But because of that, nobody’s talking.”

In fact, things were so bad and GOP senators so disgusted with the state of play that two of them, Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), couldn’t be convinced to even open debate on a doomed House-passed bill that delivered $5 billion for the border wall. The vote stayed open for more than five hours as Perdue and Gardner backchanneled with the administration, and as Schumer spoke to Trump officials and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Eventually, Flake, Corker and Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) voted to move forward on the bill and allow leaders to keep talking. Seemingly minor, the procedural move makes it possible for the Senate to act as quickly as a deal can be struck.

“Mitch certainly doesn’t want to put us out voting on something that the president has not agreed to. The key is that the president has to agree that he will [sign] this,” Flake said.

Flake met with Corker, then with Schumer, McConnell, and finally the two leaders together to move the Senate’s funding effort forward. Yet while that procedural fracas was playing out, Republicans were frantically trying to come up with something they could put on the floor.

The shuttle diplomacy continued throughout the day. Pence, Kushner and Mulvaney went from Schumer’s office to Pence’s own hideaway in the Capitol, where Corker came to visit. Then they went to the House side of the Capitol to negotiate with conservatives and GOP leaders, trying to figure out what could pass that the president would sign.

McConnell, meanwhile, was somewhat hands-off after Trump’s about-face on the stopgap bill. As emphatically as he could, Pence had told senators that Trump would sign the legislation, only to see that backfire. So Pence couldn’t sign off any deal with Schumer or House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — who was even more skeptical — unless Trump publicly backed it first.

“That was my belief at the time. That was my belief at the time based on all the representations made. But as you know, things change,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) of Pence’s comments to the GOP insisting Trump would sign the Senate’s short-term spending bill without wall money.

When Trump instead did the opposite, McConnell was quietly steaming, according to multiple GOP senators. And by the time he announced on the Senate floor on Friday that the chamber would advance the House’s bill only to stall for several hours as leaders worked to strike a deal, he was wearing a button declaring that he was part of the Senate’s “Cranky Coalition.”

Shortly after 6 p.m. Gardner and Perdue thought that a breakthrough was imminent and both chambers would move quickly. But the shutdown deadline came and went, underscoring the difficulty of scrambling together an agreement after two weeks of chaos.

And rather than force Democrats to block the House bill and allow the traditional shutdown blame game to begin, McConnell instead left the Capitol before 8 p.m. having never held a vote on Trump’s preferred legislation.

“Constructive talks are underway,” McConnell said as he walked out. Asked if he was participating, he responded: “As I said repeatedly, we need Democratic votes and a presidential signature.”

House Republicans were happy that the Senate didn’t reject their bill too, “because it took a hot potato off our laps,” in the words of one. The most recent state of play could be framed as the Senate having stalled on legislation to stop the shutdown.

Of course, House Republicans passed its $5 billion in border wall funding knowing full well it couldn’t pass the Senate. Democrats and even some Republicans seethed that Ryan — who is retiring in two weeks — didn’t simply put the Senate’s clean short-term funding bill on the House floor. It would likely have passed with support from some Republicans and a lot of Democrats, effectively daring Trump to veto it.

“Obviously the $5 billion is not going to pass,” Corker said. “Obviously everybody understands that. So what do we do in the interim, that the Democrats will take and that the president will take?”

By day’s end that wasn’t entirely clear. The House and Senate left much earlier than they usually do during a shutdown, not even pretending to play the normal political games as the clock ticked toward midnight. By 9 p.m., Pence, Kushner and Mulvaney had left too.

The day had not resulted in a breakthrough, but the needle had moved. At least a bit.

“We independently and together have heard the president say very specific things about what he would or wouldn’t do. There’s a very reasonable chance that Schumer can find common ground with that,” Perdue said.

“We woke up this morning thinking nothing is happening,” Gardner added. “Now I think we’ve opened up this door to a deal to be had.”